Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Chang Apana

Today is the 82nd anniversary of the death of
Chang Apana, so here’s a picture.

Chang Apana, best remembered as the inspiration for Earl
Biggers’s detective character Charlie Chan*, was a detective in Hawaii at the
turn of the twentieth century, his beat the seediest part of the then-wild
Honolulu waterfront. A former cowboy**, Apana
was a master of the bullwhip, and received special permission to exchange his
gun (he hated ‘em) for a whip, which he used in his many battles with local
gangsters and opium smugglers. He was
heavily and visibly scarred from his many encounters (his prominent eyebrow
scar the result of a sickle wielded by a Japanese leper), but was dogged in his
pursuit of the law, employing unconventional methods (including parkour to
reach upper-floor hideouts) to catch crooks in the act.

His most famous exploit is probably when he busted up an
illegal gambling ring, infiltrating it in disguise and, when recognized, subduing
and arresting forty Chinatown gamblers.

*Biggers basically
said that while Apana himself wasn’t the model, having read about his exploits
was what spurred the idea of employing a Chinese-American detective in his
mystery, a counter to the Yellow Peril types that were the stock representation
of Asians in American genre fiction at the time.

**Hawaiian cowboys
were called paniolos, and, like their American counterparts, received much of
their method, vocabulary, and iconography from Mexican vaqueros, brought in to
work cattle on the islands in the early 1830s.It’s from these Mexican cowboys that Hawaii developed its guitar and
ukulele culture.